The Critical Compass Podcast - Canada is Building a Surveillance State ｜ John Carpay of the JCCF

00:00:00.000 So we've got a half dozen bills, which together are the building blocks or the

00:00:03.840 foundation of the surveillance state.

00:00:05.960 Each bill by itself does not create this nightmare, hellish 0.83

00:00:13.040 communist China social credit system.

00:00:15.520 But the bills together, you've got C11 gave the CRTC legal jurisdiction

00:00:21.040 over the internet, big move, terrible move.

00:00:24.320 C18 makes it impossible for Canadians to share news with each other.

00:00:28.880 You can't share a Canadian news link through Facebook.

00:00:33.400 Is the government trying to keep us in the dark, dumb us down?

00:00:36.800 We're seeing less news today than previously

00:00:40.680 because we're not sharing news on Facebook.

00:00:45.120 You've got C9, the Combating Hate Act that we've talked about.

00:00:48.560 You've got C8, the Cybersecurity Act that gives the federal government power

00:00:52.320 to kick individual Canadians off the Internet.

00:00:54.600 got c22 the lawful access act that forces companies to keep data on file for six months

00:01:02.280 about every phone call uh you've made and and every text that you've sent and where you were

00:01:07.800 geographically when you're sending those you got c34 creating a digital safety commission

00:01:14.920 uh you got c34 the safe social media act leading to a situation where you're going to have to prove

00:01:22.040 your identity every canadian will have to prove their age and identity to use social media

00:01:29.880 you put that all together this is all towards building up a surveillance state

00:01:42.840 hi guys welcome back to the critical compass my name is mike and with always with me is james

00:01:54.720 and we are very pleased to be joined again uh by returning guest friend of the channel mr john

00:01:59.080 carpe thank you for uh for joining us again sir uh how have you been hey i've been well

00:02:04.860 generally enjoying the summer and uh so glad to be with you mike and james and with all of your

00:02:10.700 viewers and listeners well thank you again um yeah we've um it's been a few months since we

00:02:16.280 had you on so there's been some some developments on on your end on on on our end on canada's end

00:02:22.060 um we kind of wanted to eventually later in the episode we'll go into a deep dive on on bill c9

00:02:28.500 which recently came into force uh bill c34 um which you just you guys just did a um a release

00:02:34.900 on um but if um if we wanted to get started today there were some developments on uh the

00:02:39.900 cory morgan case that you guys are working on if you wanted to uh to give us the update on that

00:02:44.060 so cory morgan is a journalist with the western standard he went on to the siksika

00:02:51.640 indian reserve or aboriginal reserve indigenous reserve he went on to the siksika reserve and

00:02:58.740 this is a public area it's like a municipality you know you can drive on the roads anywhere

00:03:05.980 there's no signs saying that that you can't get in and it's private property it's not private

00:03:10.780 property so he went there and recorded a video uh probably posted online somewhere at the western

00:03:17.900 standard or i don't know if cory has his own website he just kind of photographed some just

00:03:24.540 took photos of public areas publicly visible from the road of the reserve uh be analogous maybe to

00:03:32.300 if you live in Calgary or Edmonton, somebody's driving by your house, they could take a photo

00:03:37.260 of your house. It's in a public place. And did a narrative talking about some of the conditions on

00:03:43.420 the reserve and then received a ticket in the mail for trespassing, possibly two tickets.

00:03:52.140 And so he's fighting this in court saying, look, there's no trespassing here. There's no signs

00:03:57.980 along the road saying that it's private property it's it's analogous to driving within any city or

00:04:05.940 town in alberta he didn't you know get one of these high power lenses to take photos of

00:04:14.360 inside somebody's home it's just regular stuff that that you can see and uh we suspect of course

00:04:22.000 it's a political you know we want to silence you we don't want people talking about conditions on

00:04:27.400 reserve and so the trial uh tuesday august the 25th and as far as i know the judge is reserving

00:04:37.800 the decision so a decision is going to be released in the weeks and months ahead on these trespassing

00:04:43.000 charges and so the justice center is providing lawyers to corey morgan to fight the ticket

00:04:48.840 why on free expression grounds because this looks ridiculous to us it looks like

00:04:53.800 Like, the Siksika leadership is just upset with a journalist that is saying that the conditions on the reserve are, you know, kind of grim.

00:05:07.140 To say the least.

00:05:08.860 Yeah, in a way that's no different than somebody driving by your house, taking a photo of your lawn and saying, well, looks like you haven't cut your grass in a while.

00:05:17.480 And you may not like them pointing that out and it may be embarrassing, but they're able to post it and that there's nothing.

00:05:24.840 What about the plastic flamingos on your lawn?

00:05:28.500 I mean, are those embarrassing too?

00:05:29.820 But, you know, if you don't want to be embarrassed by your plastic flamingos on the lawn or the used car, the 1975 Volkswagen that's sitting there in a state of disrepair.

00:05:40.680 But if you don't want to be embarrassed, clean up your lawn.

00:05:42.840 But if that's what your lawn looks like, somebody can take a photo of it and post it on the internet and say, you know, here's a lawn that is interesting.

00:05:52.900 This might be speculating, John, but do you suspect that there might be anything behind these charges that stem from Corey Morgan's support and his TPA for Alberta independence, maybe?

00:06:08.620 Do you think this is like a punitive type of thing?

00:06:10.460 that's you know we would never know i think that these trespassing charges were issued

00:06:19.900 a good year a year and a half ago it was quite a while back okay and at the time that they were

00:06:24.700 issued i think there was there was a referendum on separation was kind of on the horizon but it

00:06:31.500 wasn't really talked about all that much so it's not likely that that uh his support for alberta

00:06:38.060 independence had much to do with this it would be my my guess i i think it's a trying to save face 0.75

00:06:45.820 you don't want embarrassment you don't want a nosy reporter driving around on an aboriginal

00:06:50.620 reserve and and doing a video and making commentary uh but yet sunlight is the best disinfectant

00:06:57.580 if they're embarrassed about things on their reserve uh when apparently they have ample money

00:07:04.780 to to to fix things and and make it better well too bad you know don't don't shoot the messenger

00:07:12.220 right if you if you're embarrassed by what's going on then uh clean up your act uh don't be upset

00:07:19.180 about the the thing getting public exposure or if you're not embarrassed by it okay fine then you

00:07:27.260 know carry on you know what's the problem worry about yeah so what's the problem then if you're

00:07:31.740 you're not embarrassed by it yeah the the one thing that comes to mind when i'm looking at this

00:07:36.600 is it doesn't actually it's not a call it's not trying to remove his videos from youtube

00:07:43.520 because that's a that would be a free speech issue if if they were attempting to do that

00:07:50.220 so it's not actually removing the embarrassing footage but it seems like it's serving as a

00:07:55.820 deterrent for anybody else who may shed light on similar issues, um, for that band or another band,

00:08:02.820 or it, if Corey actually gets slapped with all these fines, then that's an, that could be a

00:08:12.680 chilling effect for, for future journalists in a way. Absolutely. Well, and that's for the same

00:08:21.360 reason that perhaps the ticket is issued for political purposes as a warning to say to

00:08:25.920 journalists you better not come on to an aboriginal reserve and take a bunch of photos and make a

00:08:32.080 video and comment you better not do that well from our side it's the same thing we're fighting back 0.90

00:08:38.560 hard to say no uh any aboriginal reserve that's going to try the same thing to intimidate a

00:08:44.960 reporter we will provide the lawyers you know thanks to our donors we have the money available

00:08:51.280 to pay for the lawyers to defend journalists so the journalists can do their job so we want to

00:08:58.080 push back you know just as just as hard to to fight for that freedom of expression which

00:09:05.520 includes freedom of the media freedom of the press and freedom of expression a lot of people

00:09:12.560 don't know this but it also includes the right to see and hear and listen to receive information to

00:09:21.680 get different perspectives so if if cory morgan of the western standard is silenced that not only

00:09:29.760 does that affect his right to speak but it also has a negative impact on the right the the

00:09:37.200 constitutional right to hear and listen and receive information so that's another important

00:09:43.200 part of it we want to keep these these uh these voices free so just to jump in i was gonna say

00:09:50.080 that's not the only trespassing case that the jccf is currently working on because there there's one

00:09:56.720 in uh north huron yeah north huron and that and that's that's structured around people filming

00:10:06.320 elected officials like at a municipal level?

00:10:10.880 Yeah, it's the same tactic. You know, they try to dress it up as trespassing. It has absolutely

00:10:15.600 nothing to do with trespassing, or very little, I should say. It has very little to do with

00:10:19.280 trespassing. So North Huron is one of many Canadian municipalities. There are several

00:10:26.480 cases that the Justice Centre has taken on, and then there's others we've heard about that are

00:10:31.120 taking place that that other groups are are uh helping with but this has become commonplace

00:10:37.680 where a city council will tell voters and taxpayers will tell the citizens you are not allowed to

00:10:45.200 record what goes on here at the city council meeting or the town council meeting or the

00:10:52.080 municipal district meeting we're talking municipal politics where the elected representatives are

00:10:56.880 debating public matters where traditionally pre-internet i mean now it's so easy for anybody

00:11:03.280 you know i i'm a dinosaur with technology but like i i actually know how to use this

00:11:08.400 to you know to record something right you don't need to be an expert and but back in the day you

00:11:14.800 would have media reporting on this and i don't think that the town council would have had the

00:11:20.480 nerve to kick out the reporters and say you can't you can't take notes and audio record what's going

00:11:27.840 on at a public meeting but now today every citizen can be a journalist of sorts and of sorts and so

00:11:37.040 north huron uh threatened charged these two citizens for trespassing because they refused to

00:11:42.800 just put away their phones and and and leave they refused to stop recording they were kicked out

00:11:47.760 something to that effect i i haven't recently looked at the specific thing now they got a

00:11:53.780 trespass notice so we're we're fighting that saying no you cannot as as a municipality or

00:12:00.300 regional district or town council city hall you can't prevent citizens from recording

00:12:08.300 a public meeting and posting that on the internet yeah and you know it's funny how it always seems

00:12:15.780 to be the the one way and not the other you know you you're you're a private citizen attending a

00:12:21.960 community council meeting and you god forbid you you keep a record of that but then you zoom out

00:12:28.320 one level i'm i'm i'm looking right now at your your guys's report that you released in july 22nd

00:12:34.580 the eight-step roadmap to restore canadian's privacy it's funny how like we just as individual

00:12:39.260 citizens you go up one layer of government we just don't have any privacy by default right

00:12:45.780 Yeah. Privacy is not really at play too much on a city hall recording. I mean, technically, anybody who is attending, any member of the public who's attending a public meeting, you implicitly, you give up your right to privacy when you go out in public, right?

00:13:07.780 If you're in a shopping mall and somebody takes a photo of you, you could dislike it, but you can't really complain.

00:13:14.640 You're in a shopping mall, so you're in a public place.

00:13:19.860 But quite often, the people that are recording the town council meeting, if they're video recording it,

00:13:25.880 they're getting the backs of people's heads anyway because they're trying to figure out what are the town councillors, the aldermen, whatever,

00:13:33.960 What are they talking about? What are they doing? How are they voting on different motions?

00:13:40.120 That's the issue. But having said that, yeah, if you did a recording at a town council meeting

00:13:45.400 and you caught somebody's face, that person would not have a right to privacy. But yeah,

00:13:52.040 you mentioned our report. We have privacy collapse. Canada's expanding surveillance state

00:14:00.600 is a recent report. It's on our website. Death by a thousand clicks, the rise of internet censorship

00:14:07.120 and control, government-controlled AI. And then July 22nd, yeah, privacy roadmap,

00:14:15.240 halting Canada's surveillance state, eight steps to restoring privacy in Canada.

00:14:18.880 That's on our website. We've got serious problems with privacy in Canada. It's not well protected

00:14:26.240 by legislation we've got bill c22 that has um that's now before the senate and if that passes

00:14:35.040 the government can require uh tech companies communications companies to keep your

00:14:41.680 data on file for uh six months you got bill c8 has passed into law that gives individual cabinet

00:14:50.080 ministers the power to kick individual canadians off the internet the cabinet can order secretish

00:14:56.080 uh can issue secret orders can order telecommunications companies internet providers

00:15:03.520 to not provide services to an individual uh we've got the borders uh the the legislation

00:15:12.880 governing the border it is legal for a border agent to search your cell phone without a warrant

00:15:19.520 you know we don't there's so much personal information you're writing to your

00:15:24.240 your wife your girlfriend your financial advisor your friends you know the websites you visit there

00:15:30.400 there is so much personal information on this phone and yet at the border uh the the canada

00:15:37.360 border security according to the law now in place it can search your phone without a warrant okay so

00:15:47.280 we're not talking about a situation where the police have reasonable grounds to believe that

00:15:52.240 somebody's got child pornography on their computer or they've got uh emails on their computer about

00:15:59.920 you know a terrorist plot to blow up the parliament buildings because he that's very different right

00:16:05.920 the the uh the warrant can be granted by the court to search the cell phone of somebody who's

00:16:12.480 suspected of having suspected on reasonable and probable grounds that they have pornography or

00:16:17.680 they're involved in terrorism that's legitimate if there is a warrant and every border

00:16:26.320 person in in canada has got the warrant on file and when that person comes back to canada it's

00:16:33.120 like okay we are going to search your computer that's fine but i'm talking about warrantless

00:16:38.160 searches the canada customs can say show me your cell phone you know do the do the four digit uh

00:16:45.520 or, you know, do the PIN code to get into your cell phone.

00:16:49.560 I want to look at what's on your cell phone.

00:16:51.400 They can do that without a warrant.

00:16:52.640 If you refuse, they will confiscate your cell phone.

00:16:55.840 Now, technically, of course, you can make a court case out of it

00:16:59.560 and you might win at the end of the day.

00:17:01.320 But realistically, how many Canadians can afford to go without their phone

00:17:06.000 for a day or a week or a month or a year or three years

00:17:09.880 to fight a court action over the phone's confiscation?

00:17:12.840 The process is the punishment at this point. And I can see this being easily weaponized against, let's say, somebody's vocal online. Maybe you have a journalist. Maybe you have somebody who is saying things that others find offensive.

00:17:28.460 And so if there's no warrant, then they could just be unpopular in their domain and be searched.

00:17:36.120 And you could see for ideological reasons or there are multiple reasons why somebody could be targeted by this with no accountability in a sense.

00:17:48.740 It could be targeted from on high.

00:17:50.980 it could also be the a little power trip that the local border security person wants to go on maybe

00:17:58.980 there's no politics involved they don't they don't like the look of your face or maybe they don't like

00:18:04.900 you know a t-shirt that you're wearing or whatever and it's like well i want to search your cell phone

00:18:11.540 and you know you can say well do you have a warrant well no i don't need a warrant

00:18:14.820 and then your choice is you allow your cell phone to be searched or you uh you give it up and you

00:18:22.340 fight a court case so i'm curious john um maybe this is a huge question but if if there is this

00:18:30.440 provision if there is this bill that allows these warrantless searches what would a person's recourse

00:18:35.880 be like what if you were if you were the lawyer um representing this person like how would you

00:18:40.560 approach that case say the person decides no i'm not you can confiscate my phone and i'm going to

00:18:44.960 sue you to get it back what grounds would that person have in a court so the phone call the phone

00:18:52.420 has been um confiscated uh there's no without a warrant okay because that's different right if

00:19:01.360 if there's they go to court and they get a warrant it's a good system it's a good compromise it allows

00:19:06.660 police to to do their job and and fight crime but it protects privacy of citizens if there's no

00:19:13.380 warrant so the lawyer handling the case would need to file an action in federal court against

00:19:22.820 the federal government seeking a court order to have the cell phone returned pending trial

00:19:32.900 and you might file and if you're going to do that you might as well file a court action

00:19:36.900 asking the court to strike down the current legislation that allows uh border guards to

00:19:43.380 seize phones without a warrant if you're going to do it anyways you might as well do it right

00:19:48.340 and and get a good statement of claims you're going into court you're you're asking that this

00:19:52.980 law be struck down within the context of that court action you can make a separate application

00:19:59.380 for the immediate return of the phone.

00:20:03.820 But realistically, if you had a lawyer who dropped...

00:20:06.260 See, the thing about these court actions,

00:20:08.160 if you want to put together a solid action

00:20:10.800 that's well-written,

00:20:12.840 that's going to be taken seriously by the court,

00:20:15.080 you're looking at 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 hours of research

00:20:19.060 to make sure you properly understand the law,

00:20:21.780 to make sure you're properly figuring this out.

00:20:24.560 So if you can find a lawyer who's able to drop everything,

00:20:27.320 it's going to take a week to get the court action filed and then another few days to bring

00:20:34.360 an emergency application for the immediate return of the cell phone uh you could get lucky if you

00:20:41.320 have a strong court action and you say this was uh this was issued the phone was taken without a

00:20:48.840 warrant there's no reasonable and probable grounds so on anyway that would be the pathway is you

00:20:55.160 would you would try and get a court order to um uh the court could order canada border services to

00:21:02.920 immediately return that cell phone to that person the court has the authority to do that so again

00:21:11.400 that is not a process that very many people would be willing to do and again it's essentially the

00:21:20.200 little guy putting their own resources to fight something that should not be a problem in the

00:21:26.120 first place up against a a apparatus that has unlimited funding so you are like so in a way

00:21:37.520 that that is the abuse of power that comes up time and time again in history in many different

00:21:45.640 countries where you have unlimited resources against people who are just trying to live their

00:21:51.120 lives and are like, it's going to take a few people to have a really bad time by this legislation.

00:21:59.880 You're going to see a few abuses before anything notable gets done on this. Let it be the one brave

00:22:06.380 person who's able to stand up and maybe they have enough resources and they fight it and it's

00:22:11.540 pushing back, or you have enough people affected by this that the awareness grows to a critical

00:22:17.680 mass. But at this point, I feel like with a lot of, if I talk with friends and family,

00:22:26.680 this isn't even on their radar because they're so focused on other things. Until somebody suffers

00:22:33.900 because of bad legislation, I don't think they really fully understand the ramifications,

00:22:40.160 unfortunately like it needs to get worse visibly worse before you have a a mass of people waking

00:22:49.220 up well that's true you mentioned the little guy against unlimited resources and this is where the

00:22:56.900 justice center comes in because we've got 10 000 canadians from coast to coast that are donating

00:23:03.160 uh you know some people give us a hundred dollars a year or they give us a thousand dollars a year

00:23:08.200 more, less, whatever. And all that money goes to one place from which we pay for a team of

00:23:16.180 full-time staff lawyers across Canada, lawyers, paralegals, and advocates, researchers. We fight

00:23:26.340 in the court of public opinion as well as the court of law. So this is the way, right? So the

00:23:31.780 guy whose cell phone gets confiscated at the border because he refuses to let a total stranger

00:23:37.940 peer into his private life if that were to happen and if we were able to take on the case

00:23:44.420 we're not sometimes you know at we're not able to to take on every case that that comes up but then

00:23:51.140 we'd have lawyers free of charge that would take on the case to fight for that uh yeah so you are

00:23:58.900 picking these cases that have the most impact in shifting let it be amending legislation or

00:24:06.420 the public awareness side of things that can really move the needle and push back in a way.

00:24:13.200 Yeah, as much as possible. But I always say, you know, court action should be plan B.

00:24:18.940 Plan A should be a good legislation. Like the Borders Act shouldn't. The problem is,

00:24:27.580 it's through the democratic process that our members of parliament passed legislation that

00:24:32.740 It gives the border authorities the power to search and seize cell phones without a

00:24:40.840 warrant.

00:24:41.840 That's the problem.

00:24:42.840 It's the legislation.

00:24:43.840 To challenge that legislation in court as an unreasonable violation of your charter right

00:24:50.780 to privacy, that should be plan B, right?

00:24:55.760 But we've got this long trend in Canada where the government's taken over more and more

00:25:01.240 and more and more spheres of the economy and society and our daily lives and now government

00:25:06.680 is everywhere and people have consented to that as well because you know promises of free money

00:25:14.120 and promises of security and it's going to take a while to get out of the mess like years or decades

00:25:22.280 yeah we have a very um i mean it's so often you hear people saying you know exactly like what you

00:25:29.400 You said, you know, this is but but coming from the other other direction where they say, well, hey, you know what you if you don't like the way, you know, Canada is going, well, you just need to, you know, elect a new MP in the next election.

00:25:41.100 But the problem is, is that, you know, essentially we don't have we don't have individual free thinking MPs.

00:25:48.220 We have I can't remember the statistic.

00:25:49.820 It's like in the high 90 90 percent that MPs just vote along the lines of their party for every issue every time.

00:25:57.360 So it's not like, you know, I think if you ask, you know, the average Canadian, hey, do you want to do you want to elect an MP who's going to pass legislation to make it so that a border or a random border security agent can take your cell phone without a warrant?

00:26:11.080 They would say obviously not, you know, but it seems like every election cycle, every new government we have, some greater and greater violation of our of our privacy gets just the stroke of a pen gets implemented, doesn't it?

00:26:23.680 Well, yes, but part of that too is that democracy rewards the most active people, right? Like the old saying, that's the squeaky wheel that gets the oil. There's an old French proverb, if you don't do politics, then politics will be done unto you.

00:26:42.520 And so we've had decades where people have been, most Canadians, including so many people who love truth, they love justice, they love freedom, and they sit on the sidelines and they don't pay attention to anything.

00:26:56.560 They don't take out a membership in a political party.

00:26:59.000 They don't get involved.

00:27:00.140 They don't contact their MP.

00:27:01.560 They don't contact their MLA.

00:27:03.820 I'm always disappointed.

00:27:05.460 I'm no longer surprised, but I'm disappointed.

00:27:07.200 if I'm talking to a room full of people, and I say, how many people in this room know who your Member of Parliament is?

00:27:19.120 With certainty. Like, you're absolutely sure.

00:27:21.940 The name of my Member of Parliament is, you know, Shoov Majumdar would be my answer for me in Southwest Calgary.

00:27:30.540 But, you know, and I think you get a bare majority on the MP.

00:27:34.280 and then provincially how many people in this room uh can can say with certainty that that you know

00:27:40.760 correctly the name of your mla and you get a quarter or a third of the people they don't even

00:27:47.880 know who their own mla is maybe if i ask the question do you know if your mla is a is conservative

00:27:54.840 or ndp maybe it'll go up a bit higher but people are just uh so detached and i know it's asking a

00:28:04.680 lot for people who are already busy you know especially parents with if you're raising a

00:28:09.240 family you're paying off a mortgage you're trying to earn a living you're super busy

00:28:14.680 and you know granted there are some people who truly don't have any extra time but there's an 0.95

00:28:19.720 awful lot of people in canada that are are spending uh many many where is that darn device

00:28:26.760 uh spending many hours a day just you know doom scrolling on their phone right spending hours a 0.60

00:28:31.720 day and you know if you've got time to watch tick tock videos and instagram uh you've got time to

00:28:38.360 figure out uh who your mla is and who your mp is so some of it's just plain laziness yeah again and

00:28:45.800 And with, with respect for some people who authentically really don't have the time.

00:28:50.860 So you're saying it might actually be a blessing in disguise if their phones were to get confiscated by a border agent.

00:28:57.900 For some people.

00:28:59.380 They're like, they, they had one, one week where they weren't doom scrolling and they're the happiest they've been in the whole year.

00:29:07.140 They started running for office.

00:29:08.340 Well, yeah, you still got your computer at home, you know.

00:29:10.420 There's other ways to doom scroll.

00:29:12.220 Yeah.

00:29:12.380 You can buy, you can buy a burner phone and use that to phone your member of parliament or your MLA. I don't know how much they cost, but I, I, I hear it's not horrifically expensive to, uh, to buy a temporary phone for yourself.

00:29:27.000 but um well actually that's uh that's a good segue then into um we wanted to chat with you

00:29:33.320 about um bill c9 which uh we we have actually we we chatted about before some months ago before it

00:29:41.640 was it was uh put in force because it was introduced in september of last year but it just

00:29:46.000 um just a little over a month ago um received royal assent um obviously the the combating

00:29:54.620 online combating hate act um you know this this bill makes a number of changes to the to the

00:30:03.100 criminal code and to uh certain uh restrictions that were in place before which are now removed

00:30:09.220 um maybe maybe john if you wouldn't mind can you give us an overview of some of the things that

00:30:14.500 are the most concerning to you that bill c9 uh changes in our uh in our criminal code

00:30:20.960 Well, one thing stands out, and that is the removal of a defense that had been available

00:30:28.320 to Canadians who are being criminally prosecuted for hate speech.

00:30:34.560 So as background, these hate speech laws have been on the books for decades, and Section

00:30:40.700 319 of the Criminal Code makes it a criminal offense to woefully promote hatred in public,

00:30:49.800 private conversations are exempt. If you want to use your cell phone to phone somebody and

00:30:58.280 promote hatred or private texting, okay. Anyway, it is illegal to willfully promote hatred against

00:31:06.120 a group that is identified by its race, ethnicity, national origin, skin color,

00:31:12.760 for sex, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression.

00:31:22.240 So it's very arbitrary.

00:31:23.700 If you want to willfully promote hatred in public against Canadians who, in 2021, very

00:31:30.680 reasonably chose not to get injected with a brand-new COVID vaccine for which there's

00:31:35.460 no long-term safety data, if you want to promote hatred against those people, you can.

00:31:40.540 It's perfectly legal.

00:31:41.920 If you want to promote hatred against wealthy people and say that everybody who's wealthy

00:31:47.960 is a crook and they got wealthy by ripping other people off, you can promote hatred against

00:31:53.600 wealthy people and landowners and factory owners. 0.94

00:31:57.360 You can promote hatred against politicians, lawyers, of course, right, well, that's going

00:32:02.560 to be legal.

00:32:03.560 Perfect.

00:32:04.560 And, you know, journalists, teachers, political opponents.

00:32:08.800 last year we've heard a lot of rhetoric of those alberta independent supporters are treasonous 0.98

00:32:15.680 traders and they deserve to hang and that is like deserve to hang yeah yeah isn't that inciting 0.93

00:32:22.960 violent like hatred and violence so like why is that group exempt from this legislation well the 0.99

00:32:32.240 legislation was arbitrary from the get-go it's uh it's limited only to you can't promote hatred

00:32:39.520 against somebody based on their religion skin color sexual proclivities right there's certain

00:32:47.520 there's there's a short list and that promoting hatred for those reasons is illegal but promoting

00:32:55.120 hatred against yeah uh alberta independence supporters you can say that that they should all

00:33:00.960 you know whatever think of the most extreme ugly violent thing and that is perfectly legal

00:33:08.000 now what what c9 does is it removes a defense that had been available for uh for decades ever

00:33:14.720 since this law came into being i'd have to look that up actually whether it's 1977 or

00:33:20.080 1982 whatever the uh the the year was when um the defense was a an expression of an opinion

00:33:33.280 based on belief in uh religious text and what that did practically is it it would make it pretty

00:33:41.760 hard for crown prosecutors for police to lay charges against a catholic priest or an evangelical

00:33:48.560 pastor orthodox jewish rabbi muslim imam who was teaching from sacred scripture what their sacred

00:33:58.320 scriptures whether it's the the koran the torah the bible says about homosexuality about uh about

00:34:05.760 sex about human sexuality about there being only two sexes about transgenderism uh so bill c9 got

00:34:13.440 rid of that religious defense and now it would be possible for police to lay charges against

00:34:21.280 a religious leader or religious adherent you don't need to be a pastor you could be a regular joel

00:34:26.560 adherent of orthodox judaism or islam or catholicism or evangelical christianity whatever

00:34:33.760 and if you were speaking publicly and you said that uh it was god sees it as very sinful for

00:34:42.400 for two guys to have sex with each other, how likely is it that you'll be prosecuted for hate speech?

00:34:50.320 I don't know. Probably not that likely today, but in five years, if the culture continues to go in

00:34:57.040 the wrong direction, you could get to a point. And this has happened literally in Finland. In Finland,

00:35:02.000 there was a member of parliament publicly prosecuted over hate speech because she

00:35:07.600 she cited scripture in a tweet. And it was something to do with human sexuality. And

00:35:14.980 it's just like, you can't quote a Bible verse because that's hate speech. That's where

00:35:19.560 Europe is at. This also happened some years ago to a Swedish pastor who eventually won

00:35:24.640 his case before the European Court of Justice or the European Human Rights Tribunal, eventually.

00:35:32.380 And he was criminally prosecuted. This was an evangelical or Pentecostal pastor in Sweden

00:35:39.380 who gave a sermon on a Sunday and he said, for two guys to have sex with each other is

00:35:47.120 sinful, God doesn't like it, and you know, he's facing criminal charges and this drags

00:35:55.660 on for a decade until he is eventually vindicated. So those are real life examples. So I'm sure

00:36:02.260 This is where some people in Canada want us to end up with because they don't like this kind of religious speech because it's contrary to their ideology.

00:36:12.380 Yeah, and it's not that difficult to imagine something like maybe you have a deeply religious gym owner who wants a female-only gym, and you have a trans individual who wants to join.

00:36:25.960 You don't need to be deeply religious for that.

00:36:27.760 I knew a guy in Niagara Falls who was, he was a gym owner and he had like some, he was the owner of a women's gym and there was some dude wanted to get in there and, you know, he said that he was a woman and was entitled to go in there.

00:36:45.140 And the business owner knew that his facility would like, an awful lot of the women would leave. 0.69

00:36:52.180 They had to put up with a dude in the change room. 0.99

00:36:55.120 Sorry, he wasn't religious. 0.99

00:36:56.700 Yeah.

00:36:57.060 I could see even in the case of that where originally there could be a case where the religious beliefs would give a little bit more substance in court for defense where the one gym owner you're referring to, if it's just a business decision or just an opinion that he holds, there used to be less to go by in court to like the, from a human rights standpoint,

00:37:26.200 they would strike down across multiple kind of factors but now without the religious defense

00:37:32.680 there's even one further it's they're trying to make it that it is unacceptable and there's

00:37:39.240 no excuses including no religious excuses why somebody should believe these things and if

00:37:45.880 they're outspoken and if you're if you get enough attention when you're outspoken i feel like that's

00:37:52.040 what puts a target on somebody's back to actually be prosecuted yeah well we have a current uh i

00:38:02.520 don't know the latest status of it but there's a there's a political activist by the name of bill

00:38:07.080 whatcott and he and some friends were present at this big gay pride parade in toronto in it could

00:38:17.880 have been around 2016 i'm not entirely sure it was it was quite a while back and uh they dressed

00:38:24.520 up as green zombies gay zombies green gay zombies they were these zombie outfits and they they handed

00:38:32.520 out uh small packages that looked like it looked like condom packages and but they put a religious 0.99

00:38:40.040 tract in there and it said that you know gay sex is sinful in god's eyes and uh you know 0.99

00:38:47.640 you shouldn't be doing this and it's bad for your physical health and it's bad for your soul it's 0.98

00:38:52.360 bad for your eternal salvation and obviously you know people were very offended by the flyer and

00:39:01.880 that's life that's part of a free society that's part of free speech so people were offended

00:39:06.600 the crown criminally prosecuted bill what caught uh over hate speech for distributing flyers

00:39:14.120 in which he said in and not very diplomatic language this guy is very in your face i i

00:39:20.360 suspect he enjoys offending people i don't know don't pretend to be inside his mind uh but i think

00:39:26.760 he gets a kick out of it so he he uses very offensive language to get his point across

00:39:32.760 and prosecuted for hate speech he's eventually acquitted uh rightfully so but those charges

00:39:40.280 should never have been laid in the first place it goes to the ontario court of appeal and they

00:39:45.960 set aside the acquittal and order a new trial but again this is a case where yeah somebody's got

00:39:53.160 these tracks these pamphlets that are using very undiplomatic blunt in-your-face language to say 0.86

00:40:00.280 that gay sex is a sin and that uh you know you and saying you know you shouldn't be doing this 0.98

00:40:06.280 and it's bad for your health, it can cause diseases. You might end up in hell and lose 1.00

00:40:11.080 your eternal salvation. You know, I get it. This is not a popular message. And I understand 0.54

00:40:16.840 it is offensive to people, but in a free society, should somebody be prosecuted for that? He

00:40:23.040 wasn't, I should add as well, it would be different if he said that gay people or LGBTQ 1.00

00:40:29.340 people or same-sex attracted people should all be rounded up and put to death. Okay. 1.00

00:40:34.980 Now we've got, you know, and now that would be hate speech.

00:40:39.900 And there I could see that would be a valid prosecution, right?

00:40:43.940 To go after somebody for saying that.

00:40:46.940 Yeah.

00:40:47.480 That would be a valid prosecution.

00:40:49.460 There's a, I'm not going to capture the exact scope of the argument, but there's an online commentator debate guy named Andrew Wilson who often makes the, he's an Orthodox Christian.

00:41:01.360 And he makes the argument that specifically in matters like what you're talking about with respect to sexual morality, the left, call them whatever you want, the most liberal, the most progressive members of our society, they act like their particular moral proclivities and preferences are the default.

00:41:27.460 And any religious objection to them is an incursion on the default or is an attempted restriction upon the default. But really, and his argument is that actually, they are in fact making a religious claim of their own type. They may not view it as that, but it's just as much of a subjective religious claim as the counter.

00:41:48.240 oh absolutely everybody has a belief system the most frightening people in my opinion are those

00:41:56.880 who are not aware of the fact that they have a belief system and they think that everything that

00:42:02.640 they believe is accurate and true and scientific and anybody else who disagrees with them is

00:42:08.320 superstitious uh i i'm not afraid of people who have this awareness the self-awareness to know

00:42:16.160 that they have a religious belief system of sorts, including atheism and agnosticism.

00:42:28.400 They say that those are not religious views and, strictly speaking, it's true they're not

00:42:34.480 religious. But there are assumptions that people make. When you start asking the fundamental

00:42:40.240 questions like, why do we exist? Why are we here? How should we live our lives? What is

00:42:45.280 the moral code that that we should follow where does this moral code come from is it just a

00:42:50.560 cultural thing is it subjective feeling based is there some natural law when you get into questions

00:42:56.640 about why we're here and how we should live everybody has an answer and the answer to those

00:43:03.200 questions why are we here and how should we live that is a worldview and so atheists and agnostics

00:43:11.680 Catholics are not religious as such, but they have a worldview in which they answer to these

00:43:19.940 big questions like, why does the universe exist? And why are we here? And how should 0.56

00:43:25.960 we live our lives? So people ought to, ideally, everybody should be aware of what their own

00:43:33.080 belief system is. But some people, they think that their own beliefs is just like the general

00:43:40.140 default and and anybody who disagrees is is uh it's just a kook yeah yeah not healthy very scary

00:43:47.420 and and i did want to touch on like we we've been talking a lot about like this federal legislation

00:43:55.080 and you get you have a lot of independent supporters like alberta independent supporters

00:44:01.240 they're focused a lot on ottawa but there's the institutions in alberta still need reform

00:44:08.920 Because there's a recent case that the JCCF took on, and that's with Benita Peterson, who was criticizing and trying to get, she was opposing like rainbow sidewalks in Westlock.

00:44:26.900 And that's the, correct me if I'm wrong, that's the Alberta Human Rights Commission, not anything federally.

00:44:32.640 So that's homegrown right here in Alberta, in our based conservative province of Alberta.

00:44:42.420 And in September, she's being put through, what, a two-week hearing?

00:44:47.140 Like two weeks for opposing sidewalks in a public place for ideological symbols?

00:44:54.100 Like, this seems like a very, I don't know, it seems excessive compared to the amount of perceived harm that might happen from this.

00:45:07.680 So, I don't know if you have any thoughts or information on this case. 0.71

00:45:12.780 It's outrageous that Alberta even has this on the books. 0.61

00:45:15.700 I mean, federally, we've got criminal code prohibition on the willful promotion of hatred.

00:45:20.300 And, you know, the example I just gave a minute ago, right?

00:45:23.460 you were to say that a certain group of people based on their religion, skin color, sexual 1.00

00:45:29.220 orientation, that they should all be lined up against the wall and shot and they should all 1.00

00:45:33.460 be put to death. If you were to say something like that, you would be criminally prosecuted. 1.00

00:45:38.980 Why we need provincial legislation to regulate speech is just outrageous. And so here we have

00:45:47.620 a woman who expresses an opinion against having a political symbol placed on public property 1.00

00:45:55.120 at taxpayers' expense, namely to have a rainbow flag painted on a crosswalk.

00:46:00.320 Rainbow flag is a controversial divisive political symbol, and some people love it, some people

00:46:06.800 see it as a symbol of oppression and a symbol of hatred against traditional religious beliefs

00:46:14.420 about human sexuality.

00:46:16.420 So by the way, as a free speech advocate, I support the right of anybody to wave whatever

00:46:23.700 flag they want, including a rainbow flag.

00:46:26.380 If you want to wave a flag, great.

00:46:28.980 But here, this is putting a political symbol on public property. 0.96

00:46:31.760 And all of that to say, I happen to agree with the comment of this lady, but even if 0.82

00:46:35.740 she was dead wrong and she said something I disagreed with, she shouldn't be prosecuted

00:46:40.040 for stating her opinion. 0.92

00:46:42.720 And here we have this woman being dragged through a human rights process.

00:46:49.480 And the blame lies with Daniel Smith and the United Conservative government for keeping

00:46:57.320 Section 3 of Alberta's Human Rights Act on the books.

00:47:01.080 Section 3 allows political prosecutions against Albertans.

00:47:07.720 There's another lady who publicly criticized a so-called family-friendly drag queen show

00:47:16.360 on social media, and she said a drag queen show, by definition, is not family-friendly

00:47:20.760 for that human rights prosecution under provincial legislation that is kept on the books by Daniel

00:47:27.620 Smith and the UCP government.

00:47:29.820 Yeah, crazy.

00:47:31.820 Yeah, seems like they have bigger, as the Zohan would say, they have bigger fish to swim right now. But that's awesome. Thank you for getting so deep into that act with us, or for that bill, rather, with us. 0.51

00:47:49.220 We only have you for maybe about 10 more minutes here, so I'd love to have some thoughts by you and what the society is doing currently with respect to Bill C-34 just proposed in the House.

00:48:05.200 So Bill C-34 is the latest, almost losing track of the reports here.

00:48:15.960 there are uh there's just so many of them and it's been confiscated by border security

00:48:23.000 uh the safe social media act okay this is bill c34 watch out when politicians talk about safety

00:48:29.560 because during the french revolution it was the committee for public safety that chopped off the

00:48:35.560 heads of thousands of frenchmen who were against the revolution so i was the committee for public 0.99

00:48:41.480 safety, we'll chop your head off. Watch out for safety. I call it the dreaded SS, the safety and 1.00

00:48:48.460 security. It's the excuse for suppressing free speech. It's the excuse for governments to

00:48:55.620 monitor your phone. And it's the excuse for the surveillance state. We've got to keep you safe

00:49:01.740 from the terrorists. We've got to keep you safe from the hackers. And we've got to keep you safe

00:49:07.700 from the bad neighbor next door.

00:49:10.040 We gotta keep you safe from hate speech,

00:49:12.580 from misinformation, from disinformation.

00:49:15.320 We gotta keep you safe from a virus.

00:49:17.660 It's always safety, safety, safety,

00:49:19.440 security, security, security.

00:49:21.340 So the Safe Social Media Act,

00:49:23.880 I would encourage people to look up the report

00:49:26.240 on our website, www.jccf.ca.

00:49:30.420 And it's written for non-lawyers.

00:49:32.820 It's also written for technology dinosaurs like myself.

00:49:36.420 by Nigel Hannaford, and it's easy to read for members of the public to wrap your head around this bill.

00:49:44.420 So, a few points in no particular order of importance.

00:49:47.420 We've got the creation of a new Digital Safety Commission,

00:49:51.420 which is going to be this massively powerful new federal government body.

00:49:58.420 It doesn't exist yet.

00:49:59.420 It's going to be 10 times as big, 10 times as powerful as the CRTC.

00:50:04.980 it's going to have power to regulate content on social media and eventually the internet

00:50:11.220 and it's going to be able to punish internet providers with fines of up to 10 million dollars

00:50:15.700 or three percent of your annual global annual global revenues as a corporation which if you're

00:50:22.260 facebook or instagram or whatever that's pretty expensive and so we're going to create this

00:50:27.620 federal body that's going to have immense powers to regulate the internet with very little

00:50:34.980 accountability to parliament and it's also going to empower the federal cabinet to create a whole

00:50:40.980 bunch of rules which this digital safety commission is going to impose so that's one big aspect of it

00:50:48.020 the other one is uh or maybe i want to pause there and talk about that first and then i can

00:50:52.740 transition to the other. It's just another example of the government

00:50:59.340 finding ways to create more bureaucracy, to give themselves more power, and to create something

00:51:09.460 that once it's there to dismantle that branch or that layer of bureaucracy, it's much harder to

00:51:19.720 get rid of something after the fact rather than to just prevent it going through.

00:51:25.080 But James, it's for the children.

00:51:27.120 Don't you want to protect the children?

00:51:30.260 Don't you want to protect the children from online harms?

00:51:32.740 Exactly.

00:51:33.500 Don't you want the government's help as a tired, frustrated parent?

00:51:37.260 Yeah, like if you oppose this bill, it means you hate children.

00:51:39.660 Same thing with like, who would ever oppose subsidies for like school lunch program?

00:51:44.800 like if you oppose the lunch program that means you want children to starve and that's kind of

00:51:51.940 the limits of rhetoric yeah that's the rhetoric around this but it's wrapped up in a moral

00:51:57.700 camouflage and i can understand how people the people that are maybe the least engaged if they're

00:52:04.780 just kind of watching this passively maybe they listen to something like okay well something

00:52:11.880 happened to a child and it was facilitated online and then they see this thing like yeah of course

00:52:16.920 we we need the government to step in and maybe it's rather than them thinking about well

00:52:22.840 what's the parent's responsibility what was what are these other facets of this problem

00:52:28.720 they're looking at the government to solve something that isn't actually a government issue

00:52:33.680 yeah i agree well the current laws this is so many of these laws they're trotting out like c9

00:52:40.800 supposedly protects places of worship. Well, the truth is, it has already been illegal

00:52:47.940 for many decades, possibly centuries, to obstruct somebody from going from point A to point

00:52:53.200 B. If somebody gets in between, if you're trying to get into your car and somebody stands

00:52:58.280 between you and the car door, they could be charged criminally. It's a criminal code

00:53:03.620 offense to obstruct. It's a criminal code offense to utter threats, to block access

00:53:08.740 to a house of worship, to block access to any shopping mall store, public library, any

00:53:18.760 kind of obstruction is already a criminal code offence. Violence is a criminal code offence.

00:53:24.660 So we've got a lot of laws already on the books, but then C9 comes along and says, well,

00:53:29.920 going to facilitate access to houses of worship, you know, and it's like, it's already illegal

00:53:38.100 to obstruct somebody or to threaten somebody, you know, on their way in. Now, this C34, the 0.93

00:53:49.200 Safe Social Media Act, it says we want to protect teenagers under 16. They shouldn't 0.87

00:53:56.620 be allowed onto social media. So we're going to need a facial recognition, other biometrics.

00:54:04.400 We're going to need central government ID. This is the pathway to making it a requirement

00:54:12.680 that every time a Canadian logs onto social media, you need to prove your identity and

00:54:19.700 improve your age through a driver's license or a passport or something, if we accept that

00:54:28.300 for social media, well, the next logical step is, well, the internet generally is a terrible

00:54:34.800 place for children. So every time you log on to the internet, for your safety and for

00:54:40.320 the safety of your children, the government will want to know who is logging on to the

00:54:45.180 internet what sites are they going to and that's good right to keep the children safe wouldn't you

00:54:51.280 wouldn't you mind being under government surveillance for all of your internet searches

00:54:56.940 if if uh if it was going to save save the life of one child uh wouldn't you be okay with that

00:55:02.860 yeah if um i mean it's just like you know if you got nothing to hide like why why do you even have

00:55:10.240 curtains on your house right you got you got nothing to hide so why don't why don't you want

00:55:13.540 people uh snooping inside your windows there's uh it reminds me every time one of these things

00:55:18.180 you know it seems like every week something new comes out but i i think it's a uh benjamin

00:55:23.140 franklin quote uh the the one about um those who would give up essential liberties for a little

00:55:30.420 temporary safety deserve neither um i agree yeah it's that's it it's it right you can always give

00:55:36.260 up your give up your freedom for the sake of security but the security doesn't really come i

00:55:41.060 I mean, we gave up so many of our freedoms, maybe not the three of us, but a lot of people, including I think the majority of people in Alberta, we gave up our freedoms on this pretext that we were going to save lives.

00:55:54.900 And the truth is that lockdowns didn't stop the COVID virus from getting into the seniors' homes, the old age residences, nursing homes, where that's where COVID was.

00:56:08.380 It's about the only place, really, where COVID was really deadly.

00:56:13.180 Lockdowns didn't save lives in nursing homes.

00:56:16.960 There's no evidence put forward by any government in any court action that lockdowns actually

00:56:21.040 save lives.

00:56:22.940 Because the virus went everywhere, it reached everybody.

00:56:25.360 And here we're giving up all of this freedom to have Christmas dinner with our parents

00:56:30.380 or with our kids or to, uh, you know, meet together and, uh, gather together with friends.

00:56:38.620 You know, we're giving up all this freedom for what?

00:56:41.100 What's the security you've got out of it?

00:56:42.540 Like nothing, nothing.

00:56:43.940 You could apply the same.

00:56:44.980 There's no proven benefits.

00:56:46.060 The same logic to, uh, anytime the government wants to solve a problem

00:56:51.020 and it depends on what metric, but technically if your goal was zero car deaths,

00:56:57.540 that why isn't the speed limit just 10 kilometers an hour then like and just have cameras everywhere

00:57:04.020 anybody goes over 10 10 kilometers an hour you get your license suspended like

00:57:09.220 you could see a there there is a way for them to take that metric to the extreme

00:57:16.580 and follow a goal that is so impractical and impedes life on multiple levels that

00:57:23.700 it would be absurd, but it would get that result, maybe, but what's the cost?

00:57:32.220 I'm not sure if a 10, it's an interesting point. I mean,

00:57:35.560 if the speed limit was 10 kilometers an hour, people would be so frustrated and so bored

00:57:41.900 that you might find them not paying attention when they drive.

00:57:45.460 Might have the opposite.

00:57:46.660 They're hitting people and running over people at 10 kilometers an hour because they're not,

00:57:51.280 And this has been shown over and over. There are so many examples in history, the law of unintended consequences. You do one thing with a certain goal and it just doesn't pan out the way that you wanted it to. So I'm not even convinced that the 10 kilometer an hour speed limit would save lives.

00:58:08.980 That's not even considering the overall lower living standards with the rising costs.

00:58:16.560 If it takes so much more time for everything to get from point A to point B, you can have a lower living standard.

00:58:25.120 And that means that there's more people that are dying because we don't have the same amount of money for food and shelter and having a good health care system.

00:58:35.600 Right. So there's economic costs as well that you have to take into account, because if you hurt the economy, that also kills people.

00:58:45.000 Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's, I, I use the example sometimes of, you know, you, it seems like we have every other commercial on the TV or, or ad on your, on your social media, some like health Canada warning or some like some, you know, you, more and more in the grocery store, there's, you know, like the warnings about, you know, high sugar, high salts, you know, high fat, whatever and stuff.

00:59:09.160 But like, you know, you see all these all these advertisements against drinking and smoking and things like that.

00:59:14.280 Well, I mean, the government could could with the stroke of a pen today, you know, they could outlaw tobacco and alcohol sales in Canada.

00:59:21.440 Of course, they won't because we're taxed within an inch of our lives for those products that people, the vast majority of people can use, you know, responsibly.

00:59:30.260 So it's not it's not really a matter of safety.

00:59:32.560 It's a matter of like so many things in life.

00:59:34.900 It's a matter of virtue signaling.

00:59:36.040 But I wonder if, John, if I could ask you to speculate again, do you suspect for something like a Bill C-34, is this meant as a, you know, most people don't get so in the details about these bills like we do on these conversations.

00:59:54.000 But do you suspect that maybe just the idea of these bills, the whisper about this bill as it gets talked about in media and stuff, is the true purpose of it a chilling effect?

01:00:05.280 Is it something more sinister?

01:00:06.780 Is it something maybe even less sinister?

01:00:09.640 Is it something like a virtue signal?

01:00:11.540 Like I mentioned, I don't know.

01:00:12.880 What would your intuition be?

01:00:17.360 So we've got a half dozen bills which together are the building blocks or the foundation of the surveillance state.

01:00:23.140 Each bill by itself does not create this nightmare, hellish, communist China social credit system where you're under surveillance all the time. The government knows who you are and your bank account balance and what you spend your money on, what your political views are, where you go, where you come from, where you are, what trains you're getting on, what buses, etc., etc., right?

01:00:51.120 the surveillance state. That's the terrifying totalitarian dystopia that I want to see us avoid.

01:00:59.260 Now, these various bills, each one by itself doesn't bring that about. Even C-34 doesn't bring

01:01:05.560 about total government surveillance of every Canadian and where we go, what we do and who we

01:01:14.440 associate with. But the bills together, you've got C11 gave the CRTC legal jurisdiction over

01:01:22.700 the internet. Big move, terrible move. C18 makes it impossible for Canadians to share

01:01:29.000 news with each other. You can't share a Canadian news link through Facebook. Is the government

01:01:35.380 trying to keep us in the dark, dumb us down? We're seeing less news today than previously

01:01:42.060 because we're not sharing news on Facebook.

01:01:46.580 You've got C9, the Combating Hate Act that we've talked about.

01:01:50.100 You've got C8, the Cybersecurity Act that gives the federal government power

01:01:53.800 to kick individual Canadians off the internet.

01:01:56.100 You've got C22, the Lawful Access Act that forces companies to keep data on file

01:02:03.120 for six months about every phone call you've made and every text that you've sent

01:02:08.380 and where you were geographically when you were sending those.

01:02:12.060 you got c34 creating a digital safety commission uh you got c34 the safe social media act

01:02:20.860 leading to a situation where you're going to have to prove your identity every canadian will have

01:02:25.260 to prove their age and identity to use social media you put that all together this is all

01:02:33.020 towards building up a surveillance state so i think what you're describing and we can end

01:02:37.660 on this thought is

01:02:38.660 the term I think

01:02:40.640 was first coined

01:02:42.460 by Brett Weinstein

01:02:43.940 and he said

01:02:44.720 turnkey totalitarianism

01:02:47.360 where all the pieces

01:02:49.520 are in place

01:02:50.260 and then it's ready

01:02:51.680 to be weaponized

01:02:54.120 in that way.

01:02:56.220 So it's not like

01:02:57.100 you need a single

01:02:58.620 large bill

01:02:59.440 that does everything.

01:03:01.180 And you could have years

01:03:02.240 where these are

01:03:03.060 put in place

01:03:04.180 and it's not leveraged

01:03:06.880 for its combined powers

01:03:09.520 and that might also

01:03:12.560 be one way where people think

01:03:15.580 it's not as big of a deal

01:03:17.140 because it hasn't been weaponized

01:03:19.460 like

01:03:19.820 you haven't been leaning

01:03:23.420 on all these additional powers

01:03:25.020 to the full extent

01:03:25.760 we haven't seen

01:03:26.900 what could be done

01:03:29.420 with this

01:03:30.320 until it's all

01:03:31.280 released in a way

01:03:33.100 I can't disagree

01:03:36.780 it's uh yeah yeah it was well that's depressing as hell yeah um so you always have a listen no on

01:03:43.260 on a positive note on a positive note the the justice center we've got a letter writing campaign

01:03:47.420 against bill c-34 if you go to our website if you go under a link called petitions and under

01:03:53.100 petitions we have a letter where and if you don't know who your member of parliament is it's okay

01:03:57.820 you type in your postal code hopefully you know where you live and it'll direct and it'll send a

01:04:03.820 letter to your member of parliament wherever you live in canada from you and so we have this tool

01:04:10.940 on our website to make it easy for canadians to write to their member of parliament and to say

01:04:16.940 vote against bill c34 we saw that there was a lot of pushback uh within the past year against the

01:04:23.260 government bringing forward bill c2 which was called the strong borders act should have been

01:04:28.300 called the strong surveillance act there was so much outcry and opposition and pushback that the

01:04:32.780 the government back down on it and so in similar fashion with uh with safe social media act people

01:04:38.940 need to contact their member parliament to see and and so our our website can help with that

01:04:44.300 www.jccf justice center constitutional freedoms jccf.ca go to our website today write a letter

01:04:51.840 to your mp about bill c34 and we will link uh specifically to that uh in the video uh show

01:04:58.500 notes for sure. Um, Mr. Carpe, um, thank you as always. I said this before when we, when we end

01:05:03.840 our, our shows, it's always a equal parts, uh, enlightening and, uh, illuminating and fun and

01:05:10.980 also depressing as hell. And, uh, and we, we appreciate the, the, the knowledge that you give

01:05:16.320 us, uh, regardless if it's good or bad news. Um, is there any other link or any other, uh, maybe,

01:05:22.020 uh, speaking engagements or, uh, um, book tour events or anything like that, that you're doing

01:05:27.300 you want our viewers to know about right now well we've got our calgary dinner uh for the annual

01:05:34.420 george jonas freedom award it is entirely sold out uh this year's recipient is candace malcolm

01:05:40.500 the founder of juno news and the long-standing activist in uh in journalism and um there's no

01:05:48.580 other uh justice center events as such but i would say to people if you want our free email newsletter

01:05:56.500 you can sign up on our on our website and uh two or three times a month you'll get an email about

01:06:02.980 one of our court cases or one of our court victories etc and so sign up for our email

01:06:08.740 newsletter for sure and uh yeah stay informed very good hey thank you so much again sir it's always a

01:06:15.780 pleasure to have you on the show and uh um and we'll look forward to maybe the next one in a

01:06:20.500 couple more months here thanks uh this is your third or fourth time so i i like our odds maybe

01:06:25.140 of getting you on for a fourth or fifth.

01:06:27.280 So thanks as always.

01:06:28.940 Well, it's an honor to be on your show.

01:06:30.260 Thanks very much.

01:06:31.060 And I do look forward to the next time.

01:06:33.480 Have a great rest of the day.

01:06:34.540 Thank you, sir.

01:06:35.100 You too.

01:06:35.340 Cheers.

01:06:35.700 Thanks for coming.

01:06:36.800 Cheers.

01:06:37.040 Bye-bye.

The Critical Compass Podcast - September 10, 2026

Canada is Building a Surveillance State ｜ John Carpay of the JCCF

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